In Remembrance

“This day shall be for you a memorial day, and you shall keep it as a feast to the Lord.”

Exodus 12:14

The Exodus story is one of the Bible’s most vivid and dramatic narratives.  The wickedness of Pharaoh, the steadfast courage of Moses, the horrors of the plagues, the spectacle of the the Red Sea’s high waves, frozen in place—they almost seem, to us to demand a screenplay.  There have been plenty of Exodus movies, from Cecil DeMille’s great 1956 epic The Ten Commandments, to the animated Prince of Egypt, a favorite in our household.  Earlier this week, I asked my sons if they knew about the ten plagues, and was very impressed when they could reel off all ten of them.  “Did you cover that in Sunday School?” I asked.  “No dad,” came the response—"it’s in the movie.”

I didn’t ask them if they had been reading about the Exodus directly from the Bible. But if they had tried, they would have found a story paced quite differently from any film I’ve seen.[1]  It’s not that the filmmakers need to invent lots of episodes.  All the powerful stuff comes right off the pages.  It’s that they usually leave out much of what the Book of Exodus actually says. 

Ponder: "whatever you are drawn to in following God's will"

"A brother asked a hermit, “Tell me something good that I may do it and live by it.” The hermit said, “God alone knows what is good. But I have heard that one of the hermits asked the great Nesteros, who was a friend of Antony, ‘What good work shall I do?’ and he replied, ‘Surely all works please God equally? Scripture says, Abraham was hospitable and God was with him; Elijah loved quiet and God was with him; David was humble and God was with him.’ So whatever you find you are drawn to in following God’s will, do it and let your heart be at peace."
From the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, qtd. in Stephen Freeman, "Having then Gifts Differing."  (2010)

Ponder: true justice is the fruit of bounty

"A curious thing happens to the spokesman of justice in this parable.  He is accused of envy.  What a reply to one convinced that he has suffered an injustice!  Instead of hearing as he expected, that untamperable right will be restored, he must learn that his real motive for intervening was inferior!  Yet if we accept Scripture as God's holy word, we learn a strange rule about human nature: that when it becomes necessary to invoke justice, that irreproachable value and crystalline motive, almost always something is rotten in Denmark.  To often 'justice' is used as a mask for quite different things.

Human justice is highly problematical.  It is something a man should strive for but not lean upon.  Perhaps we come closest to the true sense of the New Testament if we say that genuine justice is not the beginning but the end, and the other justice so pompously displayed as the fundament of morality is a dubious thing.  True justice is the fruit of bounty, and practicable by man only after he has been initiated into the school of divine love where he has learned to see people as they really are, himself included.  Before one can be just, one must learn to love."

Romano Guardini, The Lord (1954), 261.

Ponder: the spacious dome of mercy

"Justice is good.  It is the foundation of existence.  But there is something higher than justice, the bountiful widening of the heart to mercy.  Justice is clear, but one step further and it becomes cold.  Mercy is genuine, heartfelt; when backed by character, it warms and redeems.  Justice regulates, orders existence; mercy creates.  Justice satisfies the mind that all is as it should be, but from mercy leaps the joy of creative life.  That is why it is written that heaven rejoices more over one sinner who repents than over a hundred just who have no need of it.  High above all the stupidity and evil of mankind arches the spacious dome of mercy."

Romano Guardini, The Lord (1954), 259.

Ponder: God's word through the lips of man

"He who insists on hearing God himself shows that what he really desires is not to believe, but to know; not to obey, but to react to his own experience.  It is entirely fitting and proper that man hear his God through his fellow men, for all lives are inextricably interwoven into the one great community of human existence.  No one life is self-sufficient.  My existence draws on the core of my being but simultaneously on others in order to exist.  Plantlike, we sprout from our own seed, but we grow by feeding upon other growth.  In the same way, we arrive at truth through personal recognition; the 'ingredients' which go into that recognition, however, are brought us by others.  Man is humanity's way to God, and it befits us that God's word personally penetrate each of our hearts, but that it be brought to us by others.  God's word through the lips of man: that is the law of our religious life."

Romano Guardini, The Lord (1954), 251.

Ponder: God speaks specifically only through his messengers

"Certainly, God speaks through everything and to everything, also to me.  Everything that is reveals him; everything that happens is an effect of his guidance and somehow affects the conscience; he is palpable at the core of me.  But all this remains vague.  It is not enough to live by, not to live as I feel I must.  It is ambiguous and needs the ultimate clarification that can come only through the word of God, and this he does not speak to everyone.

Specific revelation of reality and God's will comes to me only through people.  Divine Providence selects an individual with whom he communicates directly...The idea that everyone is strong enough to bear immediate contact with God is false, and conceivable only by an age that has forgotten what it means to stand in the direct ray of divine power, that substitutes sentimental religious 'experience' for the overwhelming reality of God's presence.  To claim that everyone could and should be exposed to that reality is sacrilegious. God is holy and speaks specifically only through his messengers.  He who refuses to accept him through his chosen speaker, who insists on hearing his voice directly, shows that he either does not know or will not admit who God is, and who he is himself.

Romano Guardini, The Lord (1954), 250-251

Sharing the Word of Life: New Technology in the Church

From the Sounds of St. Francis, September, 2017

Then another book was opened, which is the book of life.”  Revelation 20:12

The Book of Revelation is perhaps the Bible’s most dramatic and mysterious section.  Revelation 20 recounts the climax of the story, the great Day of Judgement, when our Lord will return to speak the truth upon all humanity and make all things new.  It’s easy to miss the fact that the author is also noting a significant change in communications technology.  The Lamb, that is Christ, has a book, a book of life—a book, and not a scroll.

Books—codices is the technical name-were new-wave technology in the first century.  The first mention of a codex in literature is by the Roman poet Martial, who was born a few years after the death of Christ.  Before codices there had been tablets of wax and clay, as well as scrolls.  The codex was a handy technology.  Its covers protected the contents and it was easy to find one’s place.  The paper could be written on both sides, so it was more economical as well.

It took the codex a few centuries to surpass the scroll.  Religious officials were inevitably among the holdouts, with their preferences for the venerable, the beautiful, and the familiar.  In synagogues today, they still read the Torah from scrolls. 

But Christians were different.